The end of IT support as we know it

By 2020, most, if not all, information technology support (IT support) will be outsourced to external companies who manage an organization’s IT needs, according to Jason Bloomberg, technology maven at ZDnet.com. The collapse of enterprise IT is just one of his predictions in a recent article. Tracing his finger along the route the IT services industry has taken the past few years, he notes the exponential leaps in cloud computing adoption, outsourced network support and managed services among small to medium-sized businesses. From there, Bloomberg lifts his gaze out a few years and plants his finger on 2020. There, he says, lies “the collapse of enterprise IT.”

By “the collapse of enterprise IT,” Bloomberg claims that non-IT companies will stop doing IT themselves. For instance, if you own a manufacturing plant, you will employ no IT-related workers. Instead, such companies will have strategic partnerships with IT companies to which they outsource their unrelated IT requirements. In-house IT for non-IT related companies is like building your own office furniture.  

The answer is: it’s debated (as you can imagine.) Some think outsourcing your IT will completely forfeit your competitive advantage. Others foresee a less apocalyptic compromise. Joe McKendrick of ZDnet.com says all businesses will maintain strategic service-related partnerships and that there is no compromise for tech savvy executives who appropriately leverage software for their enterprise.

There’s no denying the end of IT as we know it is coming. That does NOT mean the end of enterprise IT. Instead of completely booting an IT staff, non-IT related businesses will only perform IT tasks that provide intrinsic value to their operations. What we will see is greater and greater levels of outsourcing non-intrinsic information technologies to external service managers.  Just like internally processing payroll has gone by the wayside, companies will soon outsource the management of non-essential technologies like management of servers, firewalls, email and data backup, etc.

The enterprise IT apocalypse is coming. The end (of the old, inefficient, clunky business age) is near. We’ve already seen huge surges in this trend in East Tennessee among the clients we serve in Knoxville and Chattanooga. In the post-enterprise IT-apocalyptic world, those businesses that survive and thrive will create strategic partnerships with external IT providers. These partnerships will bolster the competitive advantage of those who think strategically, anticipating the future and streamline accordingly.